Rebecca Bruton + Jason Doell: a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together [Collection CQB]. The two pieces on this disc have been pleasantly doing my head in; they’re enigmatic just by existing. Both works were created for Quatuor Bozzini and junctQín keyboard collective, who perform them here with the understated clarity you would expect. What makes these pieces stand out from the usual repertoire for string quartet with piano six hands? Well, Rebecca Bruton’s The Faerie Ribbon is a guilelessly titled work by a composer I know only from her work as half of a goofy vocal duet with Angela Rawlings. There are small vocalisations in this piece, too, slipping out here and there amongst the knotwork of superimposed melodic elements that make up the first movement. Things then break down into a sequence of vignettes: a short, wistful and wordless chorale for unaccompanied voices, a pensive interlude for piano that dwindles away to almost nothing. Things eventually rebuild into a more coherent and stately reconstruction of the opening thematic material, but the transformation is more enigmatic than a conventional resolution: an interpretation is implied but never revealed. Jason Doell’s to carry dust & breaks through the body sounds stranger than it is when you remember his altered piano pieces in becoming in shadows ~ of being touched. Strings and piano wend their way through a slow processional of restrained polyphony that pauses from time to time to remind you that the whole piece exists provisionally, held in suspense by a quivering after-image of resonant overtones and a soft low drone. The drone steadily, but almost imperceptibly, descends, and as it does the Bozzinis adjust their intonation in accord. As though unconsciously, the harmonies between the instruments stretch apart, as though threatening to break: the immobile tuning of the piano starts to sound out of kilter, even electronically altered, while all the while staying the same. The musicians maintain perfect calmness as the atmosphere grows icy.
Saviet/Houston Duo: a clearing [Marginal Frequency]. I’ve heard violinist Sarah Saviet on two sets of guttural pieces for solo instrument, and pianist Joseph Houston play composers ranging from Lamb, C. to Simaku, T. a clearing is a set of pieces jointly composed by the musicians themselves, when duetting in 2022. As you might expect, there’s a lot of exploration of timbre and technique in here, but the five pieces presented do prioritise compositional thinking and succeed as intimate, self-contained chamber works. The recording is close, detailed and stark, and Saviet and Houston know how to leave plenty of space around them when needed. For the first half, each track focuses on detailed studies of touch and decay, with small piano sounds matching fleeting violin runs, teasing out differences in sustained chords, maintaining an austere impression overall while relishing the variety of sounds they can articulate in dialogue. For the final, long track Houston switches to e-bows on the piano strings and produces drones that merge with Saviet’s held notes, mapping out degrees of warmth and cold to be found within each harmonic complex.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jason Doell, Joseph Houston, Rebecca Bruton, Sarah Saviet
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Catching up on guitars, mostly
Tuesday 25 March 2025
Yes I fell off the posting wagon again and now I’m going through the pile of stuff I’ve been meaning to write about and gosh there’s a whole lot of stuff with guitars. I’m not going to cover all of them: this is just a selection. There’s a solo improv live set from Eldritch Priest, which you would kind of expect but also not expect if you heard his Omphaloskepsis from a little while back. Dormitive Virtue [Halocline Trance] is a neat little album of electric guitar which promises to be an informative but derivative curiosity, only to turn into an informative but beguiling curiosity. You know the drill: one-off solo show in small venue, “a friend cajoled him into releasing” yada yada and the album starts out with a typically abrasive, discontinuous riff on discordant melodies from this composer. Except it’s not typical; after the opening fake-out comes a wistul, bluesey jazz rumination which sets the tone for the rest of the album. When distorted sounds reappear, they gain a reverberant sheen of moody atmospherics; the shorter improvisations are endearingly charming or endearingly playful. The pre-composed pieces focus on melody alone, retaining a gentle feel even at their most angular. His take on Wayne Shorter’s Iris makes room for small asides as elaboration, providing an insight into his own compositional ideas.
I heard Francesco Serra’s close study of empty space Guest Room a few years ago and was taken by it’s use of resonance and sympathetic vibrations. His new work Personal [i dischi di angelica] is a work of similar protracted research in a given space, but this time the focus is on solo acoustic guitar. Nothing fancy, just plucking and strumming that thing with no apparent direction or purpose. It would appear that the focus is meant to be on the sound of the guitar, but the playing style doesn’t reorient the listener’s attention to the acoustics; it just trundles along in a familiar way until it’s just hanging around in the background. The use of resonating snare drums comes later but it feels a little like a forced intervention to make things more interesting. Things actually do get a little more interesting when the guitar disappears, leaving a quiescent field recording that eventually acquires an overlay of buzzing e-bowed strings. This would work as a mysterious, shadowy counterpart to the first half of the album if the whole setup hadn’t been so protracted and innocuous.
Maybe it’s because I’ve also been listening to Varvara [self-released], a solo work by guitarist/composer Àlex Reviriego. The presence of a steel-stringed acoustic is also the central force here, but its role is much more complex. The crystalline acoustic sounds are sampled, apparently, and become the motivator for a deeply-textured web of drones and unpitched noise. The use of feedback loops and empty circuits play an important role here, creating evocative backdrops which assume greater prominence as the guitar fades away, with an inherent instability that nudges the wash of sound into darker and more disturbing moods. When the guitar reappears in part two, it has become enmeshed within the electronic noise, partly driving the drones while also acting as an armature for the increasingly alien soundscape. Despite this, the plucked strings never sound incongruous with the heavy synthesised sounds, thus making the resultant work even stranger. If that’s not enough for your to chew on, remember that this is only the second volume of Reviriego’s projected tetralogy of guitar pieces “inspired by the virgin martyrs of the early Christian church”.
Erica Dawn Lyle’s cassette for Notice Recordings also captures her working through some stuff. The two parts of Colonial Motels are extreme studies on the use of the amplifier’s tremolo knob. Once again, improvisations with single unedited takes, using looping effects to build up layers of choppy sounds which are then sculpted on the fly into quasi-melodic squalls before gusting into walls of torrential noise. The strange overall effect is the way it skips and skitters along, propelling itself through the obnoxious loudness without ever resorting to rocking out to retain each performance’s shape or momentum.
Yaron Deutsch titling his album Soul, Soul, Soul, Sweet Soul. [self-released] really doesn’t prepare you for the music here. As with Lyle and Serra, Deutsch is working out some ideas here, taking his work with other musicians as launch-points for solo excursions. Sanen Song began as a solo played over a sound installation piece by Helena Persson; Sub_Current is Deutsch’s solo part for an electric guitar concerto by Stefan Prins spun off on its own; Greetings from Astridplein takes a recording of Deutsch and Tom Pauwels playing a duet by Matthew Shlomowitz and cuts in urban field recordings. Sanen Song begins with atmospheric high drones before becoming increasingly busy with fiddly little arpeggiations and capricious pitch-shifting, while Sub_Current throws distorted power chords into a blender of pitch-bending and tone-switching, restlessly hopping between swatches of slowed-down white noise and cartoonish bendy-stretchy pedal work. Both works show invention, but their emphasis on technique suggests that they would be of more interest to other guitarists than listeners in general. Greetings from Astridplein is a nice little vignette that makes me want to hear Shlomowitz’s piece in its original form: it’s titled Hocket for Dylan & Alan.
On the other hand, Lauri Hyvärinen and Jukka Kääriäinen’s guitar duets on Pulled Apart by Horses [Bokashi] are just as relaxed and soothing as the title would have you believe. First of all, the prospect of an album of two electric guitars and nothing else should be enough to set your teeth on edge. It does, but in the most delightful way: the five tracks here are shot through with freewheeling exuberance and malicious glee. Hyvärinen and Kääriäinen maintain a knife-edge balance of calculated spontaneity, coming up with a dizzying array of sounds that never stick around too long as they careen from one idea to another without sticking in one place too long. It’s bracing but it’s more fun than most of these types of excursions.
There’s been much deserved attention for Jules Reidy’s latest album Ghost/Spirit, which makes last year’s Instants & Their Echoes [Hospital Hill] seem slept on by comparison. It’s the most surprising of the lot here, not least because of the relative absence of Reidy’s trademark guitar. A pair of self-similar works, commissioned by the brass trio Zinc & Copper (Hilary Jeffery, trumpet and trombone; Elena Kakaliagou, French horn; Robin Hayward, tuba), Instants & Their Echoes is a real ear-opener, one that reveals a new perspective on Reidy as a composer. The brass plays softly, in just intonation, building up overlapping harmonies into gently separated moments, set within a web of slowly cascading electronic tones. Reidy’s guitar can also be heard on occasion, deep in the mix to add to the glistening electronic timbres. Sounds have been extended and lowered in pitch to create reflections and imitations, that disorient while also implying a loose canonic structure that holds the piece together. It’s very spacious, in a floaty, dreamy way, as brass and gutar will periodically drop away and let the electronics sustain the mood in self-contemplation. There’s a confidence in the way the music starts and ends, twice, tinting the air and the time it takes with its sound and then withdraws without the need for justification, leaving a deep aural after-image in the mind.
